| Lord Rendall converses with his mother, in a tone that could only be described as “very English”. Their words are slow, peaceful. In what is probably the version closest to its folkloric origins, the music resorts to an artifice typical of the Renaissance and of the earliest Baroque operas: age and wisdom symbolically prevail over gender. Thus, the mother’s voice is lower than her son’s despite her being a woman and he a man. “Where have you been all the day, Rendall my son? Where have you been all the day, My pretty one?” asks the mother and she repeats the question every strophe with different variants: “What have you been eating Rendall my son?, Where did she get them from, Rendall my son?”. And her son, who invariably ends his speeches asking her to “Make my bed soon for I’m to my hart, and I fain would lie down”, will slowly tell her the details of how he was poisoned by his lover. |
|
|
|